THE ROOK
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Phaedra Cinema Director: Eran Palatnik Writer: Richard Lee Purvis Cast: Martin Donovan, John A. MacKay, Michael Finesilver, Sean Clark, Harrison Baker, Diane Grotke
This picture looks as though it were written by a committee, but not your usual group of Hollywood honchos brainstorming in the backlot of Universal Studios. The panel would be composed of Franz Kafka, Soren Kierkegaard, Jules Verne, Sigmund Freud, Edgar A. Poe, and George Orwell. They'd bat around some ideas for a fiction, cramming their signature elements helter-skelter into a one-hundred page manuscript. The novel would eventually fall into the hands of Richard Purvis, looking to compose his first feature screenplay, and Eran Palatnik, seeking to direct his first feature movie. A limited budget would allow these two fellows only eighteen days to shoot the genre-bender which, in just 84 minutes, could be classified as noir, sci-fi, horror, political, or what- have-you, but not comedy, as the dialogue lacks humor and its principal performer never smiles. How does it sound? Turns out "The Rook" is better than you might expect, an intriguing detective story whose pieces come together only in the concluding moments with a production design that mixes clothing from the early 19th century with outfits of 1950s design and positions a computerized office against the English countryside circa 1800.
The world of "The Rook" looks like one imagined by a medieval futurist, i.e. by someone living in the Britain of 1580 making like Alvin Toffler, dreaming up how the British countryside would appear in 1800. Given the nature of religious warfare that took place in this visionary's Europe at the time, he could not imagine a world at peace, but rather considers that even if various religions ceased their clashing with one another, at the very least humankind would be in conflict over what function the state should have in religious affairs.
Martin Donovan dominates the film in the role of John Abbott, a detective from Greenwich who travels by horse- drawn carriage to the broken-down hamlet of Sutheridge to investigate the murder of one Wain Sheperd. He is escorted to the morgue by the town's chief of police, Bob Brice (John A. MacKay) who appears to cooperate. Though the investigation is stymied by a lack of evidence, Abbott is supremely confident: he is a man of God who is convinced that, given his religious principles, he will solve the murder. He is besieged by strange occurrences. Someone has drawn a coded message on the corpse, a drawing which later appears on a wall. Abbott becomes aware of a maze of secret tunnels within the village. He visits an office and interviews a woman who sits on a chair that moves mechanically back and forth--a seemingly useless device fantasied by our unseen friend back in the 16th century. That fellow has imagined such a contraption just as he had conceived of the first phone system and a prototype of Ada Byron King's first thinking machine. Showing up at the office of Dr. Abby Trent (Diane Grotke), the woman who has autopsied the murder victim, Abbott is told that he does not have an appointment; and yet on the following day the physician--dressed in 1950s clothing in contrast with Abbott's Victorian threads--speaks freely with him. During the entire time the investigation of a single murder is proceeding, a revolution is taking place and the town of Greenwich is about to fall to the rebels. Abbott is nonetheless convinced that the forces or evil--that is, the insurgents who favor a separation of church and state--will be defeated by the current autocratic government with its established religion. But as the insurrectionists pile on victories, Abbott writes that he believes that God has abandoned him. Winding up alone and wounded in a cave from which he envisions no escape, he is forced to confront himself and discover his true convictions.
What are director Eran Palatnik and writer Richard Purvis getting at here? Obviously this is no simple detective story but an allegory, albeit with a limited budget and with a writer and director who must have been captivated by their course in Philosophy 101. In an interview reported in the production notes, director Palatnik confesses that the movie means whatever the viewer wants it to be mean. The story line lends itself to multiple interpretations, yet what is most praiseworthy about the film is the degree of ambiance that photographer Zack Winestine and composer Robert Een have squeezed out of it, given their finite funding. The office which serves as the center of the local government bureaucracy evokes the most curiosity with its movable chairs and creaky decoding machines while the green hue eclipsing the town invokes sheer corruption. Donovan performs his role with intense sobriety and is perhaps a symbolic stand-in for today's self-righteous religious zealots who presume to have all the answers but who are gradually doing themselves in politically in the United States and in some fundamentalist countries.
Palatnik means for us to figure the significance of the movie's title, and if I may take a stab at it...a rook is the chess piece representing the castle, in this case the particular citadel of Kafka's story which was made into the film "The Castle" in 1968. Rudolf Noelte's movie starring Maximilian Schell is, like "The Rook," an appropriately vague filmization of the novel in which K, a land surveyor, is called to a castle for work but (like John Abbott, at least symbolically) is unable to gain admittance. A rook is, of course, a swindle as well. Palatnik's film features a rather large one at that. This is a first feature which, however incoherent at times and at other times conventional in plotting, portends a fertile future for its director and scripter.
Not Rated. Running Time: 84 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews